We know that people generally don’t want something that’s otherwise worthless just because it comes in a pretty package and, conversely, that valuable goods and services are worth even more in attractive wrappings.Read more at location 1208

In the early 1990s, Motorola came out with an updated version of its most popular pager. The new version had enhanced features, but what really made it special was the pager’s colorful face.Read more at location 1212

To such critics, form is dangerously seductive, because it allows the sensory to override the rational. An appealing package can make you believe that Nazis are good, or that colas are distinguishable. The very power of aesthetics makes its value suspect. “In advertising, packaging, product design, and corporate identity, the power of provocative surfaces speaks to the eye’s mind, overshadowing matters of quality or substance,” writes Stuart Ewen,Read more at location 1230

the pervasive falsehood oiling “the machinery of gratification and instant desire” that is contemporary capitalism. Women’s fashion and fashion photography exemplify for Bell the same falsehood as advertising: “this task of selling illusions, the persuasions of the witches’ craft,”Read more at location 1239

Frankfurt School Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in an influential 1944 essay. In commercial products at least, such critics see ornament and variety not as goods that we value for their own sakes but as tools for creating false desire. Where the gullible public finds pleasure and meaning, the expert observer perceives deception.Read more at location 1245

“That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties,” declare Adorno and Horkheimer.Read more at location 1248

A conservative minister worries that evangelical churches, in their efforts to attract and hold members, have sacrificed the substance of preaching and prayer for mere spectacle.Read more at location 1260

Even worse, we fear, the aesthetic imperative is disguising who we really are. From Loos to Bell, and for centuries before them, critics of ornament have aimed some of their sharpest attacks at bodily decoration—atRead more at location 1278

In the seventeenth century, writers and preachers warned against women’s makeup, which “takes the pencill out of God’s hand,” defying nature and divine will. “What a contempt of God is this, to preferre the worke of thine owne finger to the worke of God?” exclaimed one writer condemning cosmetics.Read more at location 1280

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf advocates “civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say that she’d rather look like herself than some ‘beautiful’ young stranger.” Wolf praises the “female identity” affirmed by women who refuse to alter their appearance with makeup, hair dye, or cosmetic surgery: “a woman’s determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.” Except those born with exceptional natural beauty, authenticity and aesthetics are, in this vision, inevitably at odds. Remaining true to oneself means eschewing artifice.Read more at location 1284

Viscerally, if not intellectually, we’re convinced that style does matter, that look and feel add something important to our lives. We ignore the preachers and behave as if aesthetics does have real value. We cherish streamlined artifacts, unconcerned that they do not really move through space. We find spiritual uplift in pageantry and music. We prefer PowerPoint typefaces and color to plain, handwritten transparencies. We define our real selves as the ones wearing makeup and high heels.Read more at location 1290

English professor who advises aspiring humanities scholars on their appearance and manners. Still, she warns that the wrong clothes can be catastrophic: “If you don’t know how to dress, then what else don’t you know? Do you know how to advise students or grade papers? The clothes are part of the judgment of the mind.”Read more at location 1301

“The most important thing that I have to say today is that hair matters,” she said. “This is a life lesson my family did not teach me, Wellesley and Yale failed to instill in me: the importance of your hair. Your hair will send very important messages to those around you.Read more at location 1305

Beneath the humor is a sense of betrayal. Why are you so obsessed with my hair? Why won’t you take me seriously? It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not for ambitious public women. Hair is just surface stuff.Read more at location 1310

The joke simultaneously expresses three contradictory beliefs: that appearance matters and should be given due attention (the unironic reading); that appearance shouldn’t matter (the ironic reading); and that appearance matters for its own aesthetic pleasures rather than for any message it sends (“what hopes and dreams you have for your hair”).Read more at location 1320

What is the substance of surface? When they aren’t denouncing surfaces as lies and illusion, cultural critics typically have one explanation for why we devote time, attention, and, most of all, money to aesthetics: It’s all about status.Read more at location 1327

When they aren’t denouncing surfaces as lies and illusion, cultural critics typically have one explanation for why we devote time, attention, and, most of all, money to aesthetics: It’s all about status.Read more at location 1328

In Luxury Fever, a self-described “book about waste,” economist Robert Frank treats the aesthetic ratchet effect as entirely status-driven. We want ever-more appealing things because our neighbors have them.Read more at location 1331

in Frank’s world, finding out that our neighbors are enjoying some new luxury functions only as a competitive spur, not as information about what’s possible. We aren’t happy for the neighbors. We don’t want to share the same pleasures.Read more at location 1333

The argument depends on the conviction that we do not want those expensive shoes or large homes because of any intrinsic qualities. Frank assumes that we do not value the luxuries themselves—the soft leather of the shoes, the smooth granite countertop, the sculptural lines of the car, the drape and fit of the jacket—but just want to stand out, or at least not look bad, compared to other people. He also imagines only rivalry, not identification,Read more at location 1341

What if every product came in a plain black-and-white box—but one company invested in graphics and color? What if everyone wore drab Mao suits—but one person dressed with color, tailoring, and flair? People would, of course, be drawn to the aesthetic deviant, even though that nonconformity might well offend the reigning status hierarchy. This thought experiment suggests something at work besides status and one-upmanship.Read more at location 1354

If you show up for an interview in a custom-tailored suit only to find your prospective boss wearing khakis and a polo shirt, the mismatch in aesthetic identities will cancel out any imagined status gains.Read more at location 1361

Status competition is part of human life, of course. But cultural analysts like Frank are so determined to see status as the only possible value, and money as the only source of status, that they often ignore the very evidence they cite.Read more at location 1363

Even analysts who do not view luxury goods as waste do not necessarily credit the goods’ intrinsic sensory appeal. In Living It Up, a mostly sympathetic analysis of what he calls “opuluxe,” James Twitchell examines the spread of luxury goods, which he describes as “objects as rich in meaning as they are low in utility.”Read more at location 1376

The status critique sees only two possible sources of value: function and meaning; and it reduces meaning to a single idea: “I’m better than you.” It denies the existence or importance of aesthetic pleasure and the many meanings and associations that can flow from that pleasure.Read more at location 1402

If surfaces are “trivial stuff,” surfaces that change for no good reason are even less worthy. Hence, those who see aesthetics as “illusion” and “make-believe” are particularly vitriolic toward fashion.Read more at location 1410

“Typewriters and telephones came out in a wide range of colors in 1956, presumably to make owners dissatisfied with their plain old black models,” sniffed the influential social critic Vance Packard in his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. Nearly a half century later, many people still imagine that the world works the way Packard portrayed it.Read more at location 1415

The fashion process is not mechanical but contingent; which changes will fit the moment depends on a host of unarticulated desires and unnoticed influences, making shifts hard to predict. A fashion writer refers to “fashion’s X-factor, the unknown quantity that makes an item seem hot to a consumer.Read more at location 1454

The sales racks are full of aesthetic experiments that failed to capture the public imagination, and every such item is an argument against the notion that authorities can dictate style.Read more at location 1458

We find fashion patterns in goods for which there is no commercial market. Historian Anne Hollander notes that fashion in clothing has existed for eight hundred years, centuries longer than the apparel business. “The shifty character of what looks right is not new, and was never a thing deliberately created to impose male will on females, or capitalist will on the population, or designers’ will on public taste,” she writes. “Long before the days of industrialized fashion, stylistic motion in Western dress was enjoying a profound emotional importance, giving a dynamically poetic visual cast to people’s lives, and making Western fashion hugely compelling all over the world.” Pleasure, not manipulation, drives changes in look and feel.Read more at location 1460

Sociologist Stanley Lieberson has studied how tastes in children’s names change over time. Nobody runs ads to convince parents to choose Emily or Joshua for their newborns. No magazine editors authoritatively dictate that “Ryan is the new Michael.” But names still shift according to fashion. Name choices, like clothing choices, are influenced by the desire to be different but not too different;Read more at location 1466

Contrary to common assumptions about how fashion works, Lieberson finds that names don’t trickle down in a simple way from high-income, well-educated parents to lower-income, less-educated parents. Newly popular names tend to catch on with everyone at about the same time. External influences, such as the names of celebrities or fictional characters, do play a role in what’s popular. But cause and effect are complicated. Fictional characters don’t just publicize possible names; their creators, like new parents, select those names from the current milieu.Read more at location 1473

Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Wesley Snipes are all action stars, but their stardom hasn’t translated into millions of little Harrisons, Arnolds, or Wesleys—in part because their names just don’t sound all that appealing.Read more at location 1477

Whether for names or clothes, fashion reflects the primacy of individual taste over inherited custom. The freer people feel to choose names they like, rather than, say, names of relatives or saints, the more rapidly baby names go through fashion cycles. As Hollander observes, “Fashion has its own manifest virtue, not unconnected with the virtues of individual freedom and uncensored imagination that still underlie democratic ideals.”Read more at location 1488

This dynamic perturbs critics. Static, customary forms, they suggest, are more authentic. Thus Daniel Bell worries about the rise of syncretism, “the jumbling of styles in modern art,Read more at location 1495

Ewen, again equating style with illusion, writes that “modern style speaks to a world where change is the rule of the day, where one’s place in the social order is a matter of perception, the product of diligently assembled illusions.”Read more at location 1499

the value of objects was less and less associated with workmanship, material quality, and rarity, and more and more derived from the abstract and increasingly malleable factor of aesthetic appeal.Read more at location 1511

These goods demonstrated inherited social position; only a family that had maintained wealth and rank over generations would possess homes, portraits, furnishings, or silverware with the patina of age. You could show off your grandfather’s portrait or your great-grandmother’s silver only if your family was in fact one of long-standing status.Read more at location 1518

Surface patina demonstrated social substance. As anthropologist Grant McCracken notes, “The patina of an object allows it to serve as the medium for a vitally important status message.Read more at location 1521

Such critics exaggerated both year-to-year fashion shifts and the response of consumers; as we know from survey data, families with moderate incomes did not own large or frequently changing wardrobes.Read more at location 1537

How we deal with fashion’s flux suggests something about our inner life. Can we enjoy its pleasures, using them to create an aesthetic identity that reflects who we are, including what we enjoy?Read more at location 1555

From well-intended mothers to scathing social commentators, authorities tell us that surfaces are “meaningless.” That might be true if they meant that the value of aesthetics lies in its own pleasures, not in what it says about something else. But that’s not at all what they intend. Authorities call aesthetics “meaningless” to suggest that it is worthless and unimportant, that it doesn’t matter.Read more at location 1558

The challenge is to learn to accept that aesthetic pleasure is an autonomous good, not the highest or the best but one of many plural, sometimes conflicting, and frequently unconnected sources of value.Read more at location 1591

A bad person can be beautiful or create beautiful things. A good person can be ugly or make bad art. Goodness does not create or equal beauty. The problem with Leni Riefenstahl’s films is not that they’re aesthetically powerful—that achievement is, considered in isolation, valuable.Read more at location 1601

When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Michael Bierut had his own moment of Nazis-to-Pepsi self-doubt. He was in London and returned home to Manhattan a few days after the attack. “As a designer,” he wrote me, “I am still reeling from the images of 9/11.” The act had been horrifying, but the images it created could not have been better designed:Read more at location 1613

Bierut had forgotten the meaning and value of his work, falling into the puritanical mind-set that denies the value of aesthetic pleasure and seeks always to link it with evil.Read more at location 1628

“One of the signatures of any repressive regime,” he wrote the following day, “is their need to control not just meaningful differences—the voices of dissent, for instance—but ostensibly ‘meaningless’ ones as well, like dress. It will take some time for people to realize that creating the difference between Coke and Pepsi is not just an empty pastime but one of many signs of life in a free society.” The Afghan women who risked the Taliban’s prisons to paint their faces and style their hair in underground beauty shops, and who celebrated the liberation of Kabul by coloring their nails with once-forbidden polish, would agree.Read more at location 1632